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Romanssihuijaus - rakkauden varjolla tehty kyberrikos

Kanervo, Riikka ; Normann, Maria ; Korhonen, Helmi (2025) — Kriminologia

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DOI: 10.54332/krim.176443 (opens in a new tab)

Type:   Journal Article
Country:   Finland
Tags:   AI Deepfakes, AI-Enabled Fraud, Finland, Online Fraud, Organized Crime, Repeat Victimization, Romance Scams, Social Engineering, Victim Support
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Synopsis

            
The paper analyzes romance scams as a distinct and serious form of cybercrime, emphasizing that these schemes rely on emotional manipulation rather than purely financial deception. Offenders build fabricated romantic relationships through fake profiles, sustained communication, and deep social-engineering tactics, ultimately persuading victims to send money, disclose sensitive information, or unknowingly participate in crimes such as money laundering. The authors show how technological advances—including AI and deepfakes—have made scam operations increasingly sophisticated and locally tailored. Crucially, they argue that romance scams are not isolated acts but part of large, international criminal infrastructures operating from scam hubs in West Africa and Southeast Asia, sometimes linked to human trafficking and industrialized “fraud factories.” Despite their scope, romance scams remain statistically invisible in Finland because they are not recorded as a separate crime category and victims often refrain from reporting due to shame or self-blame. Drawing on data from the Finnish Nettideittiturva project, the authors identify common victim profiles—young adults isolated during the pandemic, middle-aged individuals in stagnant relationships, and older adults with limited digital literacy—highlighting that victims typically experience acute emotional distress, including shame, grief, and financial hardship. The paper underscores that the psychological loss of the imagined relationship often outweighs the financial loss, aligning romance fraud with dynamics seen in intimate-partner abuse. The authors conclude that Finland’s support systems and public awareness are insufficient and that effective prevention requires recognizing romance scams as a unique crime type, improving victim services, enhancing professional training, and acknowledging the broader societal impacts, including repeat victimization and cross-border criminal networks.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
Romance-scam research remains limited, with fragmented cybercrime classifications and theories that inadequately capture relational and cyber-intimacy features. Existing victim studies use relatively small, partly contradictory samples. The literature lacks evidence on recovery, support and prevention effectiveness, reporting, disengagement, repeat victimization, and links to grooming/exploitation. Western-European and North-American dominance also limits global and theoretical perspectives.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
This Finnish viewpoint article reviews international research on online romance scams and considers the phenomenon from Finland’s perspective. It also presents practice-based knowledge accumulated through the national Nettideittiturva project. Between March 2023 and September 2025, the project encountered 194 victims and relatives; staff observations and recurring client-contact patterns informed three descriptive victim-group profiles. No formal sampling, coding, or statistical analytic procedure is reported.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The article characterizes the wider evidence base as limited: victim-study samples are relatively small and findings partly contradictory. Its own project-derived profiles are based on workers’ experiences and recurring observations in client encounters, rather than a reported systematic research design. Romance scams are not separately recorded as a crime type in Finland, and underreporting and classification overlap with investment fraud constrain prevalence and loss estimates.

          

        
                  

            
Future Work

            
Prioritize research on recovery processes, support-service effectiveness, preventive-measure effectiveness, reporting behaviour, disengagement from scam relationships, and repeat-victimization risk. Further work should examine links between romance fraud and grooming/exploitation crimes, and vulnerability in relation to neurodiversity, psychiatric disorders, and addiction. Research should also diversify beyond Western theoretical frameworks.

          

              

    
    

        
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